Tag: Crazy Cars

One of the stranger games I’ve had the pleasure to play, is the enigmatic Captain Blood. Purchased by my Dad sometime in 1989-90, it was a part of an unusual compilation. The Precious Metal box had three other games, Arkanoid 2, Crazy Cars and Xenon.

Arkanoid 2 was fun but never awarded you extra lives so it was next to impossible to finish. Xenon has dorky music and sfx, but is more fun than its slicker sequel by a long way. Crazy Cars is a complete waste of time and is one of the dullest video game racers in history. Thankfully Captain Blood was a real oddball and a great game.

The premise alone is fantastic stuff.

You play as Bob Morlock, a fictional computer game programmer, known in the ‘biz’ as Captain Blood. He had just finished creating a new science fiction game, when (as always happens in the 80s) he got sucked into it.

Morlock was especially unfortunate, because the process of implanting him in the game world cloned him 30 times. It is now your job as the player to take control of Bob ‘Captain Blood’ Morlock and find these clones. Prior to the player starting the game, Morlock has absorbed twenty five of his clones over a period of 800 years, but he will soon lose all of his remaining humanity and be trapped in the game world. You have around three hours of game time to absorb the final five.

The game is mostly controlled with one of the best mouse cursors of all time, Morlock’s almost robotic grey hand. You guide this hand around his biological space ship, the Ark, to fly around the galactic map. Put Simply, Morlock needs to find out where these last clones are by asking the locals. Rarely in video games have such an array of fantastical aliens been present. However even more impressive is how you chat to them.

Captain Blood has its own language system. All the aliens speak their own languages which isn’t

Geiger influence!

English (or French in the case of this game’s developers). Their words are translated into different symbols, representing a concept, noun, emotion etc. You need to respond to them in such a way that they give you the information you need. Using the 150 or so symbols, you will be teleporting people and transporting them to new planets, destroying planets and hopefully finding out where to go next!

Probably the only downer of the game is that most of the planets are uninhabited and there is almost only one way to properly finish the game. The flying sections when you’re scouting planets for aliens are all very similar, but well animated and run very smoothly. Also the H.R. Geiger influenced visuals are a great inclusion and definitely enhance the game’s feel.

I always had difficulty knowing what the game wanted from me, and I never finished it as a result. I did understand what to do eventually, but I think it had taken a year or two of on and off playing and there were bigger and better things to play by then.

I was recently outbid on this game in an eBay auction. People are still ready to pay $40+ for this!